IT WAS ONE of the greatest waves of democratisation ever. In 1977 all but three of the 20 countries in Latin America were dictatorships of one kind or another. By 1990 only Mexico’s civilian one-party state and communist Cuba survived. Several things lay behind the rise of democracy in the region. One was the waning of the cold war. Another was the economic failure of most of the dictators. And democracy was contagious. One country after another in Latin America put down democratic roots as power changed hands between right and left through free elections.The outlook is suddenly much darker. Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, is an originally elected autocrat ruling as a dictator. He clings to power with the support of Cuba at the cost of wrecking his country and destabilising its neighbours. At least 3.7m Venezuelans have fled economic collapse and repression; organised crime and Colombian guerrillas flourish there. The repressive family despotism into which Nicaragua has degenerated under Mr Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, is almost as nasty.

These autocratic extremes would be less worrying were not elections across the region showing that there are clear signs of disenchantment with democracy elsewhere. Election rules are sometimes flouted and independent institutions undermined. Many voters are turning to populists with little commitment to restraints on power. Parties of the moderate centre are weakening or collapsing.

Immoderate urges

An election marked by fraud in Honduras saw Juan Orlando Hernández, the conservative president, win a constitutionally dubious second term in 2017. In Guatemala, which will hold elections in June, the president recently ordered out a UN investigative body into organised crime and corruption which had helped to jail two of his predecessors. Evo Morales, a leftist who has been Bolivia’s president since 2006, will seek a fourth term in October—also on dodgy constitutional grounds. In the same month, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a populist former president of Argentina who abused institutions in partisan fashion and faces corruption charges, stands a chance of being returned to office.And then there are Latin America’s two giants, Brazil and Mexico. Both have elected presidents who share a populist disregard for the norms, checks and balances, and toleration of critics that are necessary for lasting democracy.The threat is more obvious in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro, an army captain turned far-right politician, took over on January 1st. A seven-term congressman, Mr Bolsonaro is a political insider in Brazil but one nostalgic for military rule. Eight generals sit in his 22-strong cabinet and scores more officers occupy second- and third-tier posts. “Democracy and freedom only exist when the armed forces want them to,” he said in a speech in March at a military ceremony. This will be news to Costa Rica. Its decision to abolish its army in 1948 is widely regarded as having helped it stay free. He even ordered the armed forces to commemorate a military coup in 1964, which he calls a revolution. Evidence is emerging that appears to show ties between Mr Bolsonaro’s family and paramilitary militias that operate in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran populist of the left known as AMLO, has struck a more moderate tone in his first five months in office. Mexicans overwhelmingly approve of his promises to sweep away corruption and crime, as well as his modest way of life (he sits in economy on commercial flights around the country). But there are warning signs.AMLO is not a fan of independent centres of power. He has named his own “co-ordinators” to supervise elected state governors, cut the salaries of judges and civil servants, named ill-qualified allies to regulatory bodies, and stopped giving public funds to NGOs. He has also shown deference to the armed forces, placing them in charge of a new National Guard, a paramilitary police force, despite the objection of the Senate. A proposed bill to pack the Supreme Court would end its independence. In March the tax agency threatened the owner of Reforma, a critical newspaper, with a tax investigation over the seemingly trivial matter of owing 12,000 pesos (around $630) from 2015.These steps, though some are small-scale, all come from the populist handbook of disqualifying and intimidating opponents, building a political clientele and what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University have called “capturing the referees” of democracy. The measures also hint at a return to what Enrique Krauze, a historian, calls Mexico’s “imperial presidency” of past one-party rule.Not all of the region is under threat. Chile and Uruguay, among others, still enjoy stable democracy, and most governments remain committed to that goal. The region’s people are not so sure. In 2018 Latinobarómetro, a multi-country poll, found that only 48% of respondents saw themselves as convinced democrats, down from 61% in 2010. Just 24% pronounced themselves satisfied with democracy in their country, down from 44% in 2010 (see chart 1). How did democracy fall into such disrepute? How great is the threat to it? And how can democrats fight back?

The warning signs were clear. Take Eldorado, a sprawling suburb of São Paulo. In Brazil’s boom of 2005-13 it had hopes of becoming solidly middle class. A year ago, as the country’s election campaign got under way, people in Eldorado were fed up with rising crime, unemployment and a sense of official neglect. “When we go out we don’t know whether we will return alive,” lamented Cleber Souza, the president of Sítio Joaninha, a former favela. In what had been a stronghold of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), several people said they would consider voting for Mr Bolsonaro. “He’s a cry for justice from the society,” said Anderson Carignano, the owner of a large DIY shop. “People want a return to order.”Behind the discontent lies a toxic cocktail of crime, corruption, poor public services and economic stagnation. With only 8% of the world’s population, Latin America suffers a third of its murders. In many countries, the rule of law remains weak.In the 1980s, many of the new democratic governments inherited economies bankrupted by debt-financed statist protectionism. The adoption of market reforms known as the “Washington consensus” provided a modest boost to growth. The democratic governments gradually expanded social provision. After the turn of the century many economies benefited from a surge in exports of minerals, oil and foodstuffs thanks to the vast demand from China. Poverty fell dramatically, while income inequality declined steadily.

Carnival’s over

The end of the commodity boom has brought a sharp correction. Taken as a whole, the region’s economies expanded at an average annual rate of 4.1% between 2003 and 2012; since 2013 that figure has shrunk to only 1%, taking income per head with it (see chart 2). Some countries, mainly on the Pacific seaboard, have done better. Others have done much worse. Brazil is barely recovering from a deep recession in 2015-16; Argentina is stuck in a long-term pattern of economic stop-go. Mexico has grown by only 2% annually for decades.

The underlying causes include low productivity, rigid regulation, a lack of incentives for small companies to expand or become more efficient, and corrupt political structures benefiting from the status quo. For a time an expanding labour force saw the region grow despite the problems. That demographic bonus is now mostly spent. In many countries the working-age population will start shrinking in the 2020s. As economies have faltered poverty has edged up and the decline in income inequality has slowed. This has exacerbated an existing crisis of political representation.Against this bleak landscape, the worldwide ills of democracy have taken an acute form in Latin America. “There’s a kind of repudiation of the whole political class,” says Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist and former Brazilian president. Political structures “don’t correspond any more to the moment societies are living in,” he adds. That is partly a result of the digital-communications revolution in which social media have bypassed intermediaries. Political traditions also play a role.Latin America has a long history of caudillos and populists, sometimes embodied in the same person, such as Argentina’s Juan Perón. The strongman tradition stemmed from long and bloody wars of independence two centuries ago, and from the difficulties of governing large territories, often with challenging terrains and ethnically diverse populations. Many countries were rich in natural resources. Latin American societies, partly because of the legacies of colonialism and slavery, were long scarred by extreme income inequality. That combination of natural wealth and inequality bred resentments that populists exploited.But there is another political tradition in the region, one of middle-class democratic reformism, honed in the long struggle to turn the constitutionalism present at the birth of Latin American republics into a lasting reality. In various guises, this political current was in the ascendant in many countries for much of the past 40 years. Now the integrity and competence of the politicians that embodied it have been called into question.Voters abandoned such dominant parties as Brazil’s PT and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party because “they were hypocritical in talking of the public interest while being inward-looking, self-serving and corrupt,” says Laurence Whitehead of Oxford University.Corruption usually diminishes as countries get richer. Yet Latin American politics seem, for a mainly middle-income region, unusually grubby. The region’s states are marked by heavy-handed regulatory overkill mixed, in practice, with wide discretionary power for officials. The commodity boom meant more resources flowing into state coffers, and thus more money for politicians to steal.The investigation known as Lava Jato (car wash), originating in Brazil into bribery by Odebrecht and other construction companies across Latin America, has exposed the scale of the corruption to the public, leading to a widespread perception that the region’s entire political class is corrupt. In fact the investigations are a sign of overdue change. The traditional impunity of the powerful in Latin America has been challenged by independent judiciaries and investigative journalism, both a product of democracy. Brazil has seen scores of politicians convicted on charges of corruption. In Peru four former presidents have been under investigation. One of them, Alan García, committed suicide last month as police arrived at his house in Lima to jail him for alleged corruption.

Off-centre

Ironically, populists have been relatively untouched by scandal, either because they control the judiciary and the media or because a halo of the saviour of the people surrounds them. It is often centrist parties that pay the political price. That is partly because they have struggled to practise good government. The reformist zeal of the early years of the democratic wave has fallen victim to two recent tendencies in politics: fragmentation and polarisation.Brazil’s new Congress contains 30 parties, up from five in 1982. The 130 seats in Peru’s single-chamber parliament are divided among 11 groupings. In Colombia’s parliament, once dominated by Liberals and Conservatives, there are now 16 parties. Even Chile’s stable system is starting to splinter. One reason is Latin America’s unique—and awkward—combination of directly elected presidencies and legislatures chosen by proportional representation. Party switching carries a low cost.In some countries politics has become a way of making money, or a brazen means to promote private business interests. In Peru, for example, such interests often buy their way into parties, undermining party solidity and the representative character of the country’s democracy, according to Alberto Vergara, a political scientist at Lima’s Pacifico University.Another factor is that the old left-right divide is no longer the only cleavage. Evangelical conservatives are pushing back against liberal secularism on issues such as abortion and gay rights. In Costa Rica, which had a two-party system until the turn of the century, an evangelical Christian gospel singer of little previous political experience made it to a run-off presidential election last year (though he lost). As a consequence of fragmentation, governments often lack the majorities required to push through unpopular but necessary reforms.Recent elections have seen a swing to the right in South America and to the left in Mexico and Central America. In both cases that has involved the alternation of power that is normal in democracies. But the switch has been accompanied by extreme political polarisation. That has been both cause and consequence of the collapse of the moderate reformist centre. And it risks making politics more unstable.Yet there are some grounds for optimism. Latin American democracy is more resilient than outward appearances might suggest. Opinion polls suggest that only around a fifth to a quarter of Latin Americans might welcome authoritarian government. In some countries checks and balances provide safeguards. In Brazil, for example, Mr Bolsonaro’s government is a ramshackle assortment of generals, economic liberals and social conservatives. “Bolsonaro isn’t a party, he isn’t anything, he’s a momentary mood,” thinks Mr Cardoso, who trusts in the countervailing strength of the legislature, a free media and social organisations. “You have to be forever vigilant but I don’t think the institutions here are going to embark on an authoritarian line.”In Mexico, where opposition to AMLO is weak and checks and balances on executive power are only incipient, there may be greater cause for concern. But the president’s popularity may decline as the economy weakens. And the centre is not dead everywhere.

Amid the dust from the collapse of old party systems, there are glimpses of democratic renewal, led by a new generation of activists. There’s “an ecosystem of new politics in Brazil,” explains Eduardo Mufarej, an investment banker who has set up Renova, a privately funded foundation to train young democratic leaders in politics, ethics and policy. In the 2018 elections, 120 of Renova’s graduates ran (for 22 different parties). Ten were elected to the federal Congress and seven to state legislatures. They are trying to convince the public that not all politicians are self-serving.One was Tabata Amaral, a 25-year-old activist for better public education elected as a federal deputy for São Paulo. She mobilised 5,000 volunteers through social media; her campaign cost 1.25m reais ($320,000), raised through individual donations. To cut costs, she has teamed up with two other Renova graduates (in different parties) to share congressional staff. Her first brush with the old order was to find that the apartment assigned to her in Brasília by the Congress was illegally occupied by the son of a long-standing legislator, who refused to move.Julio Guzmán tried to run for president in Peru in 2016. He was thwarted when the electoral authority barred his candidacy on a technicality. He has spent the time since travelling round the country building a new centrist party. He insists that he is engaged in “a different way of doing politics” in which all members are scrutinised and donations will be made public. His Morado party is aimed at “the new Peruvian, who looks to the future, is entrepreneurial and from the emerging middle classes”.Poles apartPolarisation in Colombia’s election last year led to a run-off between Iván Duque, the conservative victor, and Gustavo Petro, a leftist who until recently was a fan of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. But there, too, is a demand for a new politics, thinks Claudia López, the vice-presidential candidate of the centrist Green Party (which narrowly failed to make the run-off). The task, she says, is to restore the trust of citizens in politicians. That partly involves competing in the emotional terrain occupied by populists. But it also means a different approach. “Nobody is interested in being a member of a hierarchical political organisation anymore,” she says. “Those of us in parties have to adapt to citizen causes or we’re dead.”These are green shoots in a forest of dead wood. But they are a sign of the dynamism of Latin American societies—democracy’s greatest asset. Latin America remains the third most-democratic region in the world according to the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The past four decades have created a culture of citizen rights and political participation. But democracy’s defences in Latin America are relatively frail, as Venezuela shows. All the evidence is that citizens want a new political order, in which politicians are more concerned with public services, security and the rule of law rather than lining their pockets. And they want it now.

War of words points to escalation risk, but there are some hopeful signs

THOUGH CHINA runs a massive trade surplus with America, over the past year it has run a massive rhetoric deficit. During that period President Donald Trump has tweeted about China 133 times; Chinese leaders, by contrast, have mostly kept mum about the trade dispute with America. But in the past few days that has begun to change. A sudden barrage of commentaries about the trade war in state media has struck a note of defiant nationalism. “If you want to talk, our door is wide open,” said an anchor on China’s most-watched news programme on May 13th, in a clip that went viral. “If you want to fight, we’ll fight you to the end.”The aggressive language comes as the two countries’ trade war heats up. Last week American negotiators alleged that China had reneged on a draft deal that was nearly complete. Chinese officials said it was the Americans who were making unreasonable demands. The breakdown in talks led to America’s decision on May 10th to raise tariffs on $200bn-worth of Chinese imports from 10% to 25%, covering products such as car parts and circuit boards.

On May 13th Mr Trump tweeted, warning China not to retaliate. It will only get worse, he said. Barely an hour later China ratcheted up tariffs on $60bn-worth of imports from America, including natural gas. And it did indeed get worse, with the United States Trade Representative shortly thereafter beginning the process of implementing tariffs on “essentially all” Chinese imports. When all is said and done, China’s nearly $560bn-worth of annual exports to America could face tariffs of 25%. Much of America’s $180bn of annual exports to China could also be subject to similar levies.Those already in place will hurt. Many economists estimate that China’s growth this year could be dragged down by about half a percentage point, to 6%. In America consumers will start to see higher prices: inflation could rise by half a percentage point, according to economists at Société Générale, a French bank. If Mr Trump follows through on the threat to hit all Chinese imports with duties—and few doubt his love of tariffs—the damage could be far greater. Chad Bown and Eva Zhang of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, reckon that the scale of American tariffs on China would resemble the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, levied just before the Great Depression.At that point China might well start making life difficult for American businesses in China. One possibility would be consumer boycotts, fanned by state media. Forecasting models scarcely capture the alarm that would spread through markets if the world’s two biggest economies engage in a full-blown trade war.There is still hope that America and China will step back. A recovery in global share prices after a big sell-off on May 13th, when the tit-for-tat tariffs were announced, reflects optimism that cooler heads will prevail. Most of the latest measures are not yet in force. America’s new 25% tariffs apply only to goods that left China after they were announced. Because it takes about three weeks for ocean freighters to make the journey, it will be June before the pain is truly felt. China’s new tariffs take effect only on June 1st. So there is time to talk.In its official statements, China’s consistent message has been that, though it will not be bullied, it wants to work towards a deal with America. Mr Trump has also shown a willingness to resume talks, saying that he will hold meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s president, at a G20 summit in Japan at the end of June. The last time the two leaders met at a G20 summit, in November in Argentina, they agreed to a truce in the trade war. That might be a reason for optimism. Then again, given where the two countries are now, it could just as well be a reason for despair.

As countries that share borders with Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil are most vulnerable to the fallout from the crisis.

By Allison Fedirka

Summary

Colombia and Brazil have adopted similar approaches to Venezuela and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Both countries have followed the United States’ lead in opposing the Maduro government but for different reasons. Their responses to the crisis stem from their individual interests and the geopolitical forces driving their behavior.

But what’s really driving their responses to the crisis? And why have they been among the region’s most vocal opponents of the Maduro government? Before we can answer these questions, we need a geopolitical basis for understanding South America’s place in the world and Brazil’s and Colombia’s most pressing geopolitical interests. South America is a region that gets little attention in geopolitical discussions, in part because the continent lies on the edge of the global system. It interacts with major geopolitical players but generally doesn’t drive major shifts, disruptions and developments. This doesn’t mean, however, that the basic rules of geopolitics aren’t at play in South America. In fact, they can help us identify the interests of neighboring countries and foreign powers in a country like Venezuela and, therefore, how they may respond to the unfolding crisis. Using models developed by some of the top geopolitical theorists, this Deep Dive will lay out a framework for understanding South America’s connection to the global system and the Brazilian and Colombian reactions to the upheaval in Venezuela.

South America’s Model Behavior

Geopolitically, South America is part of the periphery of the global system. Located in the Southern Hemisphere, which accounts for roughly one-third of the world’s landmass and one-tenth of its population, the continent is fairly removed from the rest of the world. It’s separated from the Eastern Hemisphere by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and connected to Central America by a short 140-mile (225-kilometer) border between Colombia and Panama.

In analyzing the behavior of South American nations, there are two common pitfalls. First, many tend to dismiss events on the continent as unimportant based on the erroneous belief that the periphery doesn’t matter. Second, there is a tendency to overemphasize politics and political leaders and treat them as geopolitically relevant. To avoid these pitfalls, we need to look at how some of the founding fathers of geopolitical theory – Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman – framed South America in the global context.

As a former U.S. naval officer, Mahan believed that if a country could dominate the world’s oceans, it could dominate the world. This view served as the basis for the expansion of U.S. interests across the Western Hemisphere at the turn of the 20th century – which included the creation of a security perimeter that stretched into the Caribbean. The first step in this project was to reduce Spanish influence in the Caribbean so that the U.S. could emerge as the dominant power there, which was accomplished in part through the Spanish-American War. The second was to control the Isthmus of Panama, a strategic land bridge between the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The U.S. supported construction of a canal at the isthmus, which opened in 1914, so that it could control transit between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, a power that had enormous economic value.

In contrast, English geographer Mackinder took a more European approach to geopolitics. He focused on land power rather than sea power as the determinant of a nation’s global status. Mackinder formulated the heartland theory, which defined the center of Eurasia as the world’s heartland and argued that the dominant global power would come from this region. Its coastal areas – much of Europe, the Middle East and East Asia – were seen as secondary powers and areas beyond Eurasia, including the entire Western Hemisphere, as largely irrelevant. Mackinder updated his model following the two world wars, elevating North America and the North Atlantic to a status almost equivalent to that of the heartland. South America, however, still played a minimal role in Mackinder’s updated model.

Spykman believed that Mackinder overemphasized the importance of the heartland and instead posited that the center of global power was in the rimland, the coastal areas around Eurasia. He viewed the Caribbean Sea and surrounding areas as the American Mediterranean because of their central location in the Western Hemisphere. He also believed that the dividing line between north and south in the Western Hemisphere was not the Isthmus of Panama but the northern edge of the Amazon. According to Spykman, then, the northern part of South America, including Colombia and Venezuela, was essentially part of North America and included in the American Mediterranean. He believed the U.S. needed to dominate the Caribbean to establish regional security and that the construction of the Panama Canal further increased the importance of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean in U.S. strategy. For Spykman, the U.S. faced few challenges in the Western Hemisphere, but any threat to its domination of the hemisphere come from the southern cone.

There are two important takeaways from these three models. First, the Caribbean, which includes the northern coast of South America, plays a key role in U.S. maritime security. This explains why the U.S. has intervened in Caribbean conflicts and why developments in South America can be critical to U.S. interests. Second, the northern nations of South America represent a borderland between North and South America. Conflicts and instability in this region threaten to draw in countries from both continents, and the Venezuelan crisis is one key example of this.

Brazil’s Territorial Integrity

Geographically, Brazil is defined by three key features: its large size, its natural boundaries and its north-south divide. Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world by landmass and has long faced the challenge of filling and controlling that space. Portugal was forced to colonize northeast Brazil (rather than use it as a trading post) and move south for both security and economic reasons. Shortly after the Portuguese arrived in the Americas, other European powers followed. While it had an agreement with Spain on how to divide their respective territories, no such deal existed with the U.K., France and the Netherlands – all three of which challenged Portuguese claims in the New World. The colony also needed land, labor and resources. Portuguese pioneers therefore pushed west for land on which to grow sugar cane and to find indigenous populations for enslavement.

Natural geographic barriers, however, limited Portuguese expansion beyond Brazil’s current borders. But in terms of security, its geography actually worked in its favor. Natural barriers insulated the country from the rest of South America and protected it from external threats. In the north, the Amazon’s dense forest and vast size prevented major military incursions from Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. Farther south, the massive Pantanal swamp fortified borders with Bolivia and Paraguay. In the east, the Atlantic Ocean protected Brazil from outside powers. The one area of geographic vulnerability is its flat southern border, though Uruguay provides some strategic depth there as a buffer state.

Brazil’s north-south divide is a result of its climate, unevenly distributed natural resources and river systems. The south, which has a more hospitable climate than the northeast, is the location of the country’s major population centers and the vast majority of its wealth. Its two major river systems – the Parana River and the Amazon River – split the country between north and south. The Amazon system passes through dense jungle and flows into the North Atlantic, while the Parana system generally flows south where it merges with the Rio de la Plata, though some of its tributaries flow directly into the South Atlantic. The two systems do not cross paths and have fostered their own economic and population centers with little connection between them.

These geographic features play critical roles in the models developed by the pioneers of Brazilian geopolitical theory, Carlos de Meira Mattos, General Golbery do Couto e Silva and Therezinha de Castro, in the mid-20th century. All three theorists emphasized the importance of territorial integrity – which is most at risk in the sprawling Amazon basin – and Brazil’s control over the South Atlantic.

This is where the Venezuelan crisis could have implications for Brazil’s broader geopolitical imperatives. Venezuela is just north of the Amazon, one of the most poorly integrated regions of Brazil. In fact, Roraima state isn’t even connected to Brazil’s electrical grid and gets its power from Venezuela. If Venezuela’s political crisis leads to military conflict or foreign military intervention, it could result in foreign forces pushing against Brazil’s borders. Any spillover into Brazilian territory could destabilize the area and disrupt connections to ports, making it even harder to reach and control this region. In the past, Brazil has opposed foreign involvement in management of the Amazon and permitted development and mining projects there because the government wants to maintain control over the whole region that falls within Brazil’s borders. This strategy helps Brazil repress any potential internal rebellion and provides strategic depth should an attack or blockade be waged on coastal areas.

Venezuelan migrants fleeing the crisis are also a challenge for Brazil. The flow of migrants toward and across the Brazilian border risks creating a borderland between the two countries that could pull the outer reaches of Brazil further away from its core. Another concern is that migrants who settle along the Brazilian border will compete with Brazilians for resources and jobs. Thus, early relief efforts involved flying Venezuelan migrants to areas farther south and settling them in larger cities. Brazil is also wary of delivering foreign humanitarian aid to Venezuelans from Brazilian territory, concerned that it could invite other kinds of external involvement in regional affairs. Brazil has therefore refused to deliver humanitarian supplies from other countries (including the United States) to Venezuela, insisting on providing only its own support.

Trade is another issue. Brazil has direct access only to the Atlantic Ocean, but its top trade partner, China, is a country that can be reached by sea only through the Pacific. To access the Pacific, therefore, it depends on sea lanes that run past Venezuela and the Caribbean to the Panama Canal. Any potential disruptions in this route – as a result of a conflict in Venezuela or a blockade to further isolate Maduro – could have major implications for the Brazilian economy.

Colombia’s Geographic Constraints

Unlike Brazil, Colombia is a bicoastal nation, meaning it has access to both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. But this status is not nearly as advantageous as one might expect. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it became the most important corridor between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia never developed into a good alternative to the canal because its various mountain ranges dissect the country, making overland transportation between coasts difficult. In addition, the vast majority of Colombia’s exports and imports transit through the Atlantic Ocean, so Pacific ports and infrastructure have been relatively neglected.

Colombia’s two defining geographic features are the Andes Mountains and the Magdalena River. The Andes comprise roughly half of Colombia’s territory. (The other half is composed of the Amazon and Orinoco basins.) Just beyond the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, three distinct ranges of the Andes run across the entire length of the country’s territory, stretching from Ecuador to Venezuela. The majority of its population resides in different mountain valleys, which are poorly connected by land. The Magdalena River, however, helps integrate these disjointed parts of the country. An estimated 70-80 percent of the population lives near this river or one of its tributaries. It also facilitates the transport of goods between the interior and the Caribbean port cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena, both of which are relatively close to the Venezuelan border.

Colombia has several geographic constraints that are difficult to overcome despite the country’s strategic location. According to leading Colombian geopolitical thinker Julio Londono Paredes, it was South America’s general disjointedness and difficult terrain that gave North America a substantial power advantage over its southern neighbor. Londono Paredes believed the formation of five confederations including Gran Colombia – which united present-day Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador into one entity from 1819 to 1831 – were necessary to ensure peace in South America.

But without such a union, Colombia remains weak in relation to other large Caribbean countries, particularly Mexico and Venezuela. Both countries have influence over the region in ways that Colombia does not. Mexico has historical ties to Central America (many Central American nations belonged to the same viceroy as Mexico during colonial times) and has used these links to help protect its interests on the western edge of the Caribbean. Venezuela’s islands in the southern Caribbean Sea give the country strategic depth and influence over sea lanes. Venezuela is also situated farther east along the Caribbean coast, giving it greater access to the sea and beyond.

Colombia has overcome some of these challenges by aligning with the United States on a number of issues, including how to handle Venezuela. The U.S. welcomes Colombia as a close ally in a region where it has had few in the past, and Colombia’s alignment with the U.S. gives it a boost in the regional power balance.

It’s an advantage Colombia needs given that it shares borders with five different countries and has three three-country borders. Colombia has had territorial disputes with each of its neighbors in the past, but tensions have run deepest with Venezuela, whose disputes over land and sea borders with Colombia have focused on resource-rich areas. The Venezuelan crisis threatens to reignite these tensions. Mass migration has forced Colombian authorities to dedicate more resources to border security, though thus far, it hasn’t prevented irregular crossings. For the most part, Colombia has welcomed the migrants, but it has also struggled to cope with the sheer number of Venezuelans, about 1.5 million in total, who have fled across the border. In fact, the influx has cost Colombia 0.5 percent of gross domestic product (or roughly $1.5 billion) per year, according to Colombian President Ivan Duque. Organized crime and drug trafficking are also concerns as groups involved in illicit activities operate more or less without impunity along the Colombia-Venezuela border, raising the possibility of military involvement from both sides. The country’s two major ports, Barranquilla and Cartagena, are close to the Venezuelan border, so any spillover violence or instability could disrupt some of Colombia’s most important trade hubs.

Considering all these variables, it makes sense that Colombia has taken the strongest stance against Maduro of any country in the region. It has joined the U.S. and several other nations, including Brazil, in recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president. Bogota doesn’t want the crisis to escalate into a full-blown civil war, but unlike other countries in the region, it can’t completely rule out military intervention because of the history of border disputes between the two countries, as well as the risk that the violence might spill over into Colombian territory.

Colombia needs U.S. support to protect its interests. Brazil, on the other hand, doesn’t have that same dependency on the U.S. For now, however, both Brazil and Colombia will cooperate with U.S. efforts to orchestrate Maduro’s departure because it aligns with their own national interests.

Benjamin Netanyahu has a deserved reputation for raising the stakes on the eve of knife-edge elections, turning them into a no-limits game. In 2015, Israel’s prime minister scraped home to victory after warning on election day that the country’s Arab citizens were voting “in droves”. He later apologised for implicitly casting Israeli Arabs as fifth columnists. But it did the job.Some observers think he is at it again, as he bids for a record fifth term as prime minister, with the shadow of indictment for corruption hanging over him, and facing an even tougher contest in Tuesday’s general election from a centre-right alliance led by Benny Gantz, a former army chief of staff. On Saturday Mr Netanyahu pledged to annex huge swaths of the occupied West Bank on which the Palestinians still hope to build an independent state alongside Israel. He said Israel would take not just the big clusters of Jewish settlements, mostly around Jerusalem, but also the settler outposts deep inside the West Bank.“I will impose sovereignty, but I will not distinguish between settlement blocs and isolated settlements,” Mr Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 12 News. “I will not uproot anyone [among the Jewish settlers], and I will not transfer sovereignty to the Palestinians.”Some argue this is just rhetoric fashioned for election eve by a canny politician who is ready to say anything but is fundamentally risk-averse. That view is almost certainly wrong.It first of all underestimates how far the Israeli political spectrum has tipped to the right, pulled enthusiastically by Mr Netanyahu and a cast of extremists he has no compunction in embracing.This should not be a surprise. Last year the central committee of his rightwing Likud party — whose charter expressly repudiates a Palestinian state — voted unanimously to extend Israeli sovereignty and law to “all liberated areas of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]”. If the polls are right Mr Gantz’s coalition will narrowly beat Likud, but Mr Netanyahu will still have the better chance of forming another coalition — stretching even further to the far-right, and taking in groups that advocate the “transfer” of Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries.That alone makes it unlikely that the prime minister will tone things down. Even in his outgoing government, his education minister Naftali Bennett was demanding annexation, while his justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, wants to draw the teeth of Israel’s high courts and extend Israeli law into the West Bank — de facto annexation and a two-pronged assault on the rule of law.But the really fundamental change has been wrought by President Donald Trump, who has ripped up decades of US policy and international law on the Middle East.Last year Mr Trump recognised Jerusalem — including the Israeli-occupied Arab east of the holy city annexed after the Six day war in 1967 — as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there. Last month he called for recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the same war and annexed in 1981. Both these decisions were declared legally null and void by the UN Security Council — respectively in resolutions 478 and 497 — a decision made possible only because the US declined to use its veto, which it has wielded 41 other times since 1967 to shield its Israeli ally.Mr Trump’s volte-face on Israel’s land-grabs seems aimed at boosting the threatened political fortunes of his friend Mr Netanyahu. The idea that Mr Netanyahu will resist annexation because it cuts across the eternally delayed “deal of the century” — whereby Mr Trump will solve at a stroke the conflict between Jews and Arabs about how or whether to share the Holy Land — is risible. Mr Trump and his point-man on this, his politically callow son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have been ticking off the Israeli right’s wishlist. There is, however, an underlying point lurking here.Mr Trump’s endorsements of annexation, aside from delighting the west’s adversaries from Russia to China, are a gift to Mr Netanyahu’s irredentist rivals, such as Mr Bennett and Ms Shaked. They would put an eventual US imprimatur on something between applying Israeli law in most of the West Bank (the Golan model) or outright annexation (the Jerusalem model).He has opened a path for Israel’s ultra-right to annex the West Bank, now home to almost 650,000 Jewish settlers, including the 200,000 in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, among close to 3m Palestinians. That would end any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state, and condemn future generations of Israeli Jews to the instability of living in a single state with Palestinian Arabs as second-class citizens — who would eventually outnumber them in the cramped and combustible space between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean.That is why some Israeli leaders such as Ehud Barak, a former army chief and prime minister, have warned that the alternative to a two-state outcome was a single “apartheid state” that would undermine Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic state. That is also why even Mr Netanyahu, who has never actually been willing to give Palestinians more than some sort of supervised, supra-municipal government, saw pragmatic virtue in keeping the two-states scenario in play.Mr Trump, in his casual geopolitical munificence towards his Israeli friend, has ended that. The annexation genie is out of the bottle. This story, seen by Arabs as the colonisation of the Palestinians by Israel, is reaching the point of no return.

Over the past 6+ months, we’ve been covering the price rotations in precious metals very closely. We’ve issued a number of amazing calls regarding Gold and Silver over the past few months. Two of the biggest calls we’ve made were the late 2018 research post that suggested Gold would rally to above $1300, then stall. The other amazing call was our research team’s suggestion that April 21~24 would see Gold setup an Ultimate Base, or what we were calling a “Momentum Base”, near $1250 to $1275.We issued both of these markets calls many months in advance of these dates/price levels targeting these moves. In both cases, we issued these market calls well over 60 days prior to the move actually taking place. The accuracy of these calls can be attributed to our proprietary price modeling solutions as well as the skill and techniques of our research team. Don’t mind us while we take a few seconds to take credit for some truly amazing precious metals calls over the past 6+ months.This Weekly Gold chart highlights just about everything we have been suggesting would happen over the past 12+ months. The rally in Gold from below $1200 to almost $1350 setup an upside price leg that we believe is still just beginning. The rotation lower, after the February 2019 highs, setup the Momentum Base near April 24 – RIGHT ON TARGET. Now, the upside price advance that we’ve been predicting should launch Gold well above the $1400 price level appears to be setting up.Our Adaptive Dynamic Learning price modeling system, as well as our Adaptive Fibonacci Price modeling system, have been key elements to unlocking these early calls. You can read more about our earlier Gold and Silver calls by reading this article: https://www.thetechnicaltraders.com/adl-predictions-for-price-of-gold/The next leg higher for Gold will see a price peak near $1450 before another brief sideways/stalling pattern sets up. After that, our research suggests a rally will quickly drive Gold prices above $1550 (or much higher).

As we’ve been suggesting, Silver will likely lag behind Gold by about 20+ days. We believe Silver is going to see an incredible upside price move – even bigger than Gold in percentage terms. Our belief is that Silver will be trading above $26 to $28 per ounce – almost DOUBLE the recent low price level, when Gold will be trading just above $2000 per ounce. The reason for this is the relationship between the Gold/Silver/US Dollar pricing levels – called the Gold/Silver Ratio. The chart is below.When the ratio is above 0.80, we consider this to be a “Moderate Peak” zone for Gold. Where the price of Gold (per ounce) represents more than 80 ounces of Silver. The ratio of the price of Gold to the price of Silver is a fairly common measure to determine when Silver is very undervalued compared to Gold. When the ratio typically falls above 0.80, then the price of Silver is very cheap compared to the price of Gold. When this ration move above 0.90, these levels are Extreme Peaks in the disparity of pricing between Gold and Silver. These are the areas where both Gold and Silver rally back to restore a ratio level closer to 0.60 or 0.65 (or lower).This would indicate that the price of Silver will rally much faster than the price of Gold and in order for this ratio to move back to the 0.06 level, Silver would have to rally at a rate of 1.35:1 or 1.45:1 compared to Gold.

This Weekly Silver chart highlights the levels we are watching for the upside breakout in Silver to begin – $15.40 or higher and we believe the upside price move in Silver till accelerate well above $18 per ounce very quickly. Again, the move in Silver will likely lag behind Gold by at least 20+ days. So now if the time to buy Silver in physical form (or any form) as we prepare for this move. Once it starts, we can promise you that the rally will be impressive and quick.

Watch how Gold and Oil react over the next few weeks as Fear re-enters the global markets. Our belief is that Oil will fall while Gold initiates the first leg higher, towards $1400 to $1450 before stalling. Once this happens, we can be certain a new upside price advance is beginning in Gold and this could be a fairly strong indicator that the markets are weakening and there is increased global fear.

If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.